US Added 151,000 Jobs In October, Where's Mine?

Beating expectations, the US added 151,000 jobs in October, for the first time since May. Analysts had projected only a 60,000 gain. It wasn’t enough to nudge the unemployment rate, however, which held at 9.6%.

Education and health services lead the gain, followed by temp work and retail. So if you’re looking for a gig, check out those sectors for possible job opportunities. Also, I hear the tri-corner hat industry is booming.

Step 1: Somebody makes up something bad about Obama. Or cites a very suspect source. In this case its a Indian provincial politician who I’m sure has complete access to the Obama itinerary and and security costs. I mean who would give them to a random local politician?
Step 2: You post that lie on your right wing blog.
Step 3: Other blogs post to your blog and vice versa, creating a circle jerk
Step 4: Fox news picks it up, does no actual research and inserts the “some say” or “some reports”
Step 5: The blogs report on the Fox News report as evidence its true.
Step 6: Fox News uses that echo to increase the outrage, “increasing reports say that Obama is spending $10B on a trip to India” and interviews people about how outraged they are.
Step 7: Dispite it being thoroughly debunked, it’s already part of the narrative and becomes true.

Or is the economy starting to improve since, for the last three months if not longer, its been quite obvious that there was going to be a big swing in the power on Capital Hill.

Let me just explain by using talking points/claims from Daily Kos and the lefty blogosphere… Businesses, thanks to Citizens United, can pour unlimited amount of funds into campaigns in an effort to buy the elections. Knowing that they could put their Republican tools into power – and the dumb citizens of the US would be so easy to fool – signs starting pointing to the Republican takeover two or three months ago. Confident that they were going to win and have their Manchurian Candidates in power, businesses started to believe that the government was going to become unregulated and allow them to run rampant again… so they started hiring so they can begin the process of destroying the environment again.

Yeah, it’s clear the multinational corporations understand who is really in their corner and who is looking out for them – the GOP. It’s just too bad that so many of the poor, working class and (shrinking rapidly) middle class wage earners don’t. They continue to vote aspirationally.

I’ve heard the “rapidly shrinking” middle class line for YEARS now… are there actually any statistics confirming this? Because since the 90’s they’ve been saying that. And if it was “rapidly shrinking” wouldn’t it have disappeared in the a decade?

Sure – read any book or study written by Elizabeth Warren. She’s been tracking middle class trends – most especially bankruptcies – for a couple of decades now. Her books have plenty of references and are evidence based.

I was hoping you’d mention her – and specifically bankruptcies. One of the problems we have today as a nation is that we don’t save as much as we used to. True, we have plenty more things to spend the money on and we really don’t use money anymore, everything is done electronically and some people can go months without touching physical bills.

The way the “middle class” becomes solid is through savings. That is the easiest and most reliable way to become not just middle class, but wealthy. Bankruptcies are the clear sign of this… you don’t get rich by borrowing.

Yeah…. so if you have read some of her studies or her books she specifically addresses – again, with lot of robust data – why saving has become so much more challenging for wage-earners. And it’s not because of spending too much on consumer electronics, or luxury items, etc…. If you’re actually interested in learning more, I strongly recommend looking at her work, if only to get info on other great research in this area.

I love the way you completely ignore my main point. Liberal ideas of big government, high taxes and diminishing personal freedoms don’t work and are bad for the U.S. They had the time and the power to facilitate the positive change they went on and on about while campaigning, and they failed. Yet you STILL blame republicans. Amazing.

Given the the GOP was the REASON for the lack of getting things done, yes. I don’t automatically blame the GOP for everything, given I’m not an affiliated anyway, but in this case they provided nothing to the last 2 years but opposition and propoganda.

Yes. Including the budget that’s required every year. Or new laws regulating net neutrality. Or a myriad of other necessary and/or partisan laws and procedures.

Gridlock screws everyone else up. Businesses are frozen awaiting the fate of Bush-era tax cuts, so good luck getting them to hire until they finish that decision. Yeah, that’s right, the lack of job grorth is PARTIALLY the fault of gridlock.

… yes they could? And did? A lot? Actually, they usually didn’t even have to filibuster, they just threatened to and that was enough because of stupid Congressional rules that don’t require filibusterers to actually talk for hours anymore… Also they used a lot of anonymous holds on virtually everything.

“personal freedoms” – not sure what you’re talking about here. The people trying to limit who you can marry, what you can do with your own body re: reproduction, heck who even COUNTS as a person are the GOP.

Given that most of their work was A) Completed and hasn’t had time to fully effect anything, B) Was curtailed by the GOP and couldn’t get off the ground, or C) Was completed and HAS had a positive effect, no you’re wrong.

Get off the Right-Left argument man. I don’t care what party you are or what you think the right solution is. We get so worked up in being right that we don’t actually do anything.

I want my politicians to come a compromised agreement and actually ACT. Doing nothing gets nothing. Doing something, even if it fails, was at least an attempt. And failing is just as important as succeeding, and both provide you with learning.

I think it’s naive to think the Republicans are willing to compromise, any more than Democrats are. Both sides don’t know how compromise actually works.

But for the last two years, as an unaffiliated voter, I think it’s obvious the GOP has purposely been an opposition party. And just being an opposition to change and progress is wrong. It’s wrong for the country, and its wrong for their constituents.

If you want to see something interesting, look at the voting breakdown by party during Bush’s years for his major legislation and then at Obamas. Then tell me who was bipartisan…

Democrats. The proof of it is exactly what you allude to – the higher propensity of Democrats to break ranks and vote for Republican bills than Republicans to break ranks and vote for Democrat bills.

What you’ve discovered is the Paradox of Bipartisanship. If you have one party that will not under any circumstances break ranks, and one party that contains people who will break ranks and vote across the aisle, then what it looks like is that the first party is passing “bipartisan” bills and the second party is not. But the exact opposite is true – the first party is the hyper-partisan one that never breaks ranks, and the second is the one willing to compromise and allow some members to vote for the other party’s bills.

Bipartisanship, in other words, isn’t whether or not you can attract the other side into voting for your legislation. It’s whether you’ll allow your own members to break ranks and vote for the other side’s. That’s why the Democrats are more bipartisan, precisely because no Republicans ever vote for a Democrat’s legislation.

Well its still good to hear people are able to get back in the work force even with the high unemployment claims. I would assume some of those that got jobs would have been in the process for unemployment claims. I am curious if it was because of all those Halloween stores that popped up that put up these numbers, just a wild guess.

Are you looking at temp work? I got out of law school in the high hog year of 2006. I didn’t find permanent work (doing work that I could have been doing without anything more than an Associates) until post crash 2009. And even that was partly due to the fact that I had several well liked connections there.

What he’s saying is that these aren’t the type of jobs that signal the economy recovering. While ANY job is a good thing for a person, a temporary job is, at best, a nominal thing for an economy trying to recover.

Why? Because they go away. Those being hired for the Halloween stores lost their jobs this last week. Christmas jobs are starting to be hired, but most will lose their jobs on 12/26. Those jobs won’t come back until early next October when Halloween starts gearing up again…

That’s not good for an economy. We need jobs (even IC-type jobs) that are permanent…

Are you looking at temp work? I got out of law school in the high hog year of 2006. I didn’t find permanent work (doing work that I could have been doing without anything more than an Associates) until post crash 2009. And even that was partly due to the fact that I had several well liked connections there.

Hmm..not in NJ. Our Republican governor is laying people off and cutting funding left and right during these tough times. He screwed the state out of 3 billion dollars for construction jobs and 400 million towards education jobs and recently said another 1200 people are being laid off soon too. wonderful

Because if I remember correctly, the $3 billion for construction workers was for the tunnel into NY? The same project that NJ has to pick up all the overruns? Yeah… such a great deal for a state that is broke…

And I believe the 400 million… how much does NJ spend per pupil today versus ten/twenty years ago… have there been even semi-proportional results?

Yeah, $3 billion in federal funding is great for a project that’s going to cost $10 billion or more.

NJ does spend a lot on education, and NJ does rank highly in education. Unfortunately many of our most expensive districts are in poor, urban areas where spending more money does not improve students’ outcomes. You can’t make kids learn when poor, uneducated parents don’t care about their kids’ education, and the kids don’t see education as a way out of being poor. The cycle will continue until attitudes change, no matter how much money we throw at the problem.

It was a good deal for NJ. As someone who commutes everyday to NY, the tunnel is badly needed and most people agree that it will have to be built. It’s only going to be more expensive in 5 or 10 years and who knows if the $3billion from the federal government is going to be there.

Also, it doesn’t make alot of people happy when the governor vetos the bill to leave the tax rate for those making over a million dollars at exactly the same rate it’s been at for the last 2 or 3 years and instead lower it saying that it’s a hardship for millionaires…and then at the same time lay off 40,000 (last I read) workers making roughly $50,000 and then saying no to $3.4 BILLION dollars which would have given those people their jobs back.

The US adds around 100,000 working-age adults to the population each month so In order to keep pace, the economy has to add 100,000 jobs a month.

This is only the second time this year where job growth exceeded population growth – and only by 59,000. At this pace, it would take over four years to make up the jobs lost since Obama became President.

Actually Obama used Bush’s budget and approach until the Stimulus. So, you’d have to measure from the date of the Stimulus (where Obama diverged from Bush on budget approach), to get your real number. I’ll wait….

Does that even keep up with the number of new people entering the workforce? I forget the number, but there has to be a base number of jobs created to keep up with those entering v. exiting the workforce to even tread water.

..and in 6 months the Republicans will slosh those numbers into their claims of successes since the election. If we were currently losing jobs, they’d exclude the first three months after getting elected, if we’re gaining, they’ll include a month or two before they were elected.

The Minneapolis, St. Paul area is just busting with jobs. Haven’t seen anything like this in years. The recession is definitely over here. We had a lot of shovel-ready projects that took advantage of the stimulus money, so that might have kick-started it. Also, a record year for crops is helping, since a lot of our economy is based on food production. But our medical tech industry is also rehiring. Move to Minnesota, if you can handle the winters ;-)

I’m concerned as much as anyone about unemployment. But, if the unemployment rate is 10%, that means that 90% of the public have jobs. Since there are at anyone time 1,000s and 1,000s of jobs open…is there literally a high national concern about jobs..or could a lot of it be perception?